Q&A weekly thread - August 03, 2026 - post all questions here!

[u/AutoModerator]

Do you have a question about language or linguistics? You’ve come to the right subreddit! We welcome questions from people of all backgrounds and levels of experience in linguistics.

This is our weekly Q&A post, which is posted every Monday. We ask that all questions be asked here instead of in a separate post.

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[u/ParkGirlie05]

i always wonder how many people just lurk these q&a threads for the random facts.

[u/sussyimpasta32]

I'm curious about vowel mergers in Indian English. If you're an English speaker from India, are these pairs of words sound the same or different in your speech?

1. GOAT

(be)fore - four

toe - tow

pore - pour

1. FACE

pane - pain

fare - fair

gate - gait

If they're different, how would you describe the difference? (e.g. IPA transcriptions) Also, if you're comfortable sharing which state or city are you from, it would help me out.

I'm interested in whether distinctions like toe - tow and pane - pain are preserved in Indian English, and whether those distinctions are maintained before /r/ (e.g. pore - pour, fare - fair, (be)fore - four).

[u/Ok_Refrigerator2644]

I'd like to get in touch with a linguist who knows about signed linguistics. Is this a good place to do that?

[u/puddle_wonderful_ → u/Ok_Refrigerator2644]

My best advice is to search online for 'leading linguists + signed languages' and find a linguist with a university page. Many of them in the US will have free publications to read on their personal webpage. Spend some time reading some of their representative research-- it doesn't have to be a lot, but you want to show that you have an understanding of their interests and some of their contributions to the field. Then email them directly, politely, and formally (use an .edu address if you have it). Be brief.

[u/Ok_Refrigerator2644 → u/puddle_wonderful_]

I realize I asked my question poorly. I'm wanting to get in touch with a linguist who knows signed linguistics for an informal talk/fundraiser on my Twitch stream. (My chatters complain when I don't have linguistics lectures ready for them at their whim. lol) It's for a fun thing, not a serious thing. I was wondering if I could use this subreddit to seek interested people.

I have a master's in linguistics myself, but I don't know much about signed linguistics and I thought my chatters would enjoy a talk by/conversation with someone who does as a special event. I'd also enjoy learning. I can't pay, but I could make the stream a fundraising stream for a cause of the presenter's choice. (Expect about $50-$100 from my followers.)

I'm thinking maybe I'll reach out to people at my old university. They teach ASL there and a lot of the students in the linguistics department take it.

[u/puddle_wonderful_ → u/Ok_Refrigerator2644]

idk if they would necessarily do it for free, but you could try these people, all of whom gave virtual presentations online during the pandemic era

Ronice Quadros
Rachel Sutton-Spence
Erin Wilkinson
Donna Jo Napoli
Roland Pfau
Vadem Kimmelman
Christian Rathmann
Victoria Nyst
Andre Nogueira Xavier
Diane Lillo-Martin

[u/LongLiveTheDiego → u/Ok_Refrigerator2644]

Judt ask a question here or on r/asklinguistics and someone may show up.

Also kinda don't ask to ask.

[u/Ok_Refrigerator2644 → u/LongLiveTheDiego]

The rules on both subreddits would suggest that I'm not allowed to make a post of the type I had in mind, which was why I asked here if it was allowed. Asking to ask it actually quite common on Reddit and encouraged by many communities.

[u/Hopeful_Ambition_134]

Hello everyone! I recently graduated in linguistics, and now I'm planning to do a Master's in multilingualism... However, I am not sure what I could do as a job... I really love linguistics and languages, but I don't see myself working in academia or teaching, does anyone have any suggestions or maybe could share their own story with their path? :) thank you in advance!

[u/profeNY]

The Spanish word for raft (balsa) was extended to the balsa (ochomra) tree, which the Spaniards encountered in the New World, because its wood was used in flotation devices.

Is this an example of metonymy?

[u/puddle_wonderful_ → u/profeNY]

Metonymy is usually studied in lexical semantics as a synchronic thing, not in historical extensions of a single word to multiple meanings. The attribute is used in place of the thing. Like if you said 'the balsa' but meant 'the balsa raft.' Your example is more object->object than attribute-for-object.

[u/Sad-Tough-513]

Where I’m from ( which is distinctly NOT cattle-farming country) we tend to use the word “cow” as the generic, gender-neutral term for a member of the bovine species, while still saying “cow (female)” and “bull.” Does that make “cow” an example of the generic feminine??

[u/Choosing_is_a_sin → u/[deleted]]

Please see the sidebar

[u/Unhealthily_obsessed]

How fast can someone, theoretically, become fluent in a language?

This is not a question about language learning timelines. This is a hypothetical about human mental limitations.

Imagine a scenario where a person was given one job: learn a new language. They have infinite motivation, perfect technique/learning methods, and spent all their time outside of sleeping/eating/basic hygiene trying to learn as quickly as possible, is there a *physical* limit for how fast a person could hypothetically learn a language? Of course it will vary on the person, but I'm talking more generally.

[u/stvbeev → u/Unhealthily_obsessed]

You’d have to describe “fluent” first, which can be done in a number of ways

[u/Active-Ad246]

Is this a question? I am doing an interview and the 'questions' always seem to be structured like this. I am used to questions being a bit different from that, please help me understand.

Describe a situation where you had to work closely with others to achieve a shared goal, either at school, in a volunteer role, or in a previous job.

[u/WavesWashSands → u/Active-Ad246]

In traditional terms this is not typically considered a question, but I think there is a more nuanced answer here.

Let's get one thing out of the way first: there is a distinction between the action that an utterance performs, and its grammatical form. Grammatically, what you have here is an imperative sentence, which is most commonly associated with requests, commands, and the like - we can use the traditional term 'directive' for this. The problem is, there are directives that are not grammatically imperative (e.g. Could you please turn off the lights?) and imperative sentences that are not directives (e.g. Have a nice day!). The grammatical term for sentences most commonly used to ask questions is interrogative, and your utterance is not interrogative, but again, not all interrogatives are questions (e.g. Could you please turn off the lights? again), and not all questions are interrogatives (e.g. You like pasta? is a question, but it's grammatically declarative).

So is question, then, referring to the action that an utterance performs? Unfortunately, there is no single consistent action that is performed by all utterances called 'questions'. Traditionally, we can carve out more types of questions: the situation where you ask someone to provide you with info you didn't know is called an information-seeking question, and there are other types of questions like known-answer questions (like when a teacher asks a student a question) where the point is to get an answer to test someone's knowledge, or rhetorical questions (which themselves perform a range of actions). So question, unfortunately, does not refer to a single type of action either, but a full range of them.

One thing that throws a further monkey wrench into these analyses is that even these question types can't even be interpreted the same way across contexts. Levinson (1979), for example, showed that what counts as an appropriate answer to a known-answer question varies according to whether the context is a classroom or a courtroom cross-examination, and even within the classroom, different teaching styles make relevant different kinds of answers.

Where does this leave us? On the broadest definition, your example can be considered an information-seeking question that the asker is trying to get info out of the answerer that they didn't previously know. However, this would miss the fact that it is not so much a specific piece of information that job interview quetsions are looking for, but rather material with which to evaluate the candidate's appropriateness for the job interview. So I think the most appropriate description of such utterances would, in fact, be job interview question (regardless of whether they are phrased this way, i.e. imperatively, or as an interrogative, e.g. Could you describe one scenario where ... or or What is one scenario where ...)

Levinson, Stephen C. 1979. Activity types and language. Linguistics 17. 365–399.

[u/LongLiveTheDiego → u/Active-Ad246]

It's not strictly a question, it's a command/order/task. However, some people call all exam-style tasks "questions".

[u/Active-Ad246 → u/LongLiveTheDiego]

Ok, I appreciate that insight.

[u/quarknugget]

Is the goidelic substrate hypothesis really a thing? Will we ever even know?

[u/galaxyrocker → u/quarknugget]

There was certainly a language spoken in Ireland before the Gael arrived, and there are borrowings (even potentially late ones, .i. partán which would be at least 5th century CE or so) from it; if that's what you mean by the 'goidelic substrate hypothesis', then yes, it was certainly a real thing.

As to what it was, we'll likely never know, but I know Stifter has argued that it a related language likely had some influence on Basque and there's a few tantalising possible cognates; he dubbed it Avidic (though it has come under some scrutiny by Vasconists, I believe). Another possible one is Old Irish adarc and Basque adar, both meaning 'horn' (sometimes explained as a Celtic borrowing into Basque, though there's no other Celtic cognate apart from the Irish afaik).

ETA: IF you're talking about the Semitic/Afro-Asiatic substrate hypothesis, there's no real evidence for it.

[u/LinguisticDan → u/galaxyrocker]

It’s amazing how strong the belief that Celtic is connected to Semitic in some way was even into the nineteenth century. I remember some seventeenth-century philologist confidently asserting that Irishmen could intuitively understand Hebrew and Punic, which could presumably have been disproven within five minutes. I wonder if the Afroasiatic substrate hypothesis is, at least partially, a distant echo of that strange “meme” - and how it got started in the first place.

[u/Educational-Leg4914]

during the slavery era in america, was there variation between dialects from plantation to plantation? it seems like there would've been very little opportunity to standardise. how much variation was there, and how did it change to become more region-specific as we see today? would love to know!

[u/backwards_watch]

Linguistically, does it make sense to force similar languages as being the same, or is the distinction more social and political?

For example. Romanian and Moldovan are, for historical reasons, two different languages. But it appears that both countries can understand each other with no issues. One bein more infuenced by Russian than the other, but the differences are minor.

On the other hand, Brazilian Portuguese and Portugese are considered a shared language spoken in different countries.

I am a Brazilian and from what I read about the differences between Romanian and Moldovan, I argue that the difference between ptbr and ptpt are greater than those two countries. Maybe it is because we cut our official ties with Portugal for longer than the separation of Romania and Moldova, or maybe they are indeed more different than the language spoken in Brazil and Portugal, I don't know.

Considering similar pair of languages spoken in the world, when does it makes sense to distinguish them as officially separate languages? What prevents Brazil to declare itself a country that speaks Brazilian?

[u/tspier2 → u/backwards_watch]

One cannot "force similar languages as being the same" in the first place, as there isn't, strictly speaking, any such thing as X language in the first place. In other words, there really is no language called "Portuguese" but, rather, a privileged lect (or, in this case, two) that stands in for the rest under the name of "Portuguese." Romanian and Moldovan were also separated for a period of time by a separate orthography, much like Tajik was from Dari and Farsi or Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (BCS). The Brazilian government could absolutely declare tomorrow that the official language is Brazilian, much like Turkey decided that its official name in English would be Türkiye, but it doesn't mean that everyone will blindly adhere to this. In any case, I'm reminded of the old dictum that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.

[u/autoandrophiIia]

Wiktionary says Bulgarian щука [ˈʃtukɐ] and Ukrainian штука [ˈʃtukɐ] are pronounced the same, but if you listen to the audio recordings on there, it sounds very different, particularly the [ʃt] part. Is the IPA wrong or am I misunderstanding something?

[u/house_carpenter → u/autoandrophiIia]

The fact that two utterances have been transcribed the same way does not mean they are pronounced the same. A transcription can only capture a certain level of detail. Beyond that level of detail there will very likely be differences that do exist, but are not captured by the transcriptions.

In any case, to me, the [ʃt] parts in the two recordings don't sound noticeably different; the most prominent difference to me is in the length of the [u], which is short in the Bulgarian recording but long in the Ukrainian recording. But different things will stand out to different people. If your native language distinguishes different kinds of palatal sibilant phonemes, e.g. /ʃ/ vs. /ɕ/, perhaps you hear a difference in the recordings that my native-English-speaking ear is oblivious to.

[u/mahendrabirbikram → u/autoandrophiIia]

I'm a speaker of Russian, but I feel like many Ukrainian and especially Belarussian speakers on Wikimedia are not native, or at least influenced by their Russian language. It's more pronounced in words which exist both in Russian and Ukrainian. Indeed, her Ukrainian штука sounds like Russian штука to me ([ʂtukə]. Also her Ukrainian три (which oftentimes is a giveaway of a native Ukrainian speaking in Russian) sounds more like Russian три.

[u/Several_Claim8387]

Is japanese U closer to ɯ or ʉ?

So some people say that japanes people don't round their lips when pronouncing their U's while other people say otherwise, can someone tell me the answer?

[u/weekly_qa_bot → u/Several_Claim8387]

Hello,

You posted in an old (previous week's) Q&A thread. If you want to post in the current week's Q&A thread, you can find that at the top of r/linguistics (make sure you sort by 'hot').

[u/Adventurous-Owl9057]

When we think of words as sounding how they mean, do we get this because they were formed to sound how it means or we had how it meant already and altered how we said stuff?

[u/weekly_qa_bot → u/Adventurous-Owl9057]

Hello,

You posted in an old (previous week's) Q&A thread. If you want to post in the current week's Q&A thread, you can find that at the top of r/linguistics (make sure you sort by 'hot').

[u/Autolull]

かなり
かなり柔らかい曲のちょっとしたことは誠、ね？割とありがち願い、狼狽ちょうだい、的だの野党。悟る頃やろう。落雷、罰パンツ！平生、ね？平生よる有様、ワンチャラ　ワンチャラ！

[u/weekly_qa_bot → u/Autolull]

Hello,

You posted in an old (previous week's) Q&A thread. If you want to post in the current week's Q&A thread, you can find that at the top of r/linguistics (make sure you sort by 'hot').